After the previous post which describes how to send screen video from the Ubuntu phone to a file on your desktop via netcat, it occurred to me that it ought to be possible to just display your Ubuntu phone directly on your desktop’s screen in a window… and with basically the same trick, it is.
Connect to your Ubuntu phone with ssh: if the phone is plugged in with a cable then opening the Ubuntu SDKIDE’s Devices pane will let you do this, or there is a phablet-shell command which does the same thing when plugged in with a cable, and once you’ve done that once you can ssh to the phone over the network with ssh phablet@phone-ip-address.
In that ssh session, run: mirscreencast -m /var/run/mir_socket --stdout --cap-interval 4 -s 360 640 | nc desktop-machine-ip-address 1234
In a separate terminal on your desktop machine, run: nc -l -p 1234 | mplayer -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo w=360:h=640:format=rgba - (note the hyphen on the end of that command; it is important!)
and: you get your phone’s screen, live, in a window on your desktop. Handy for screencasting at conferences or for hangout video demonstrations or similar.